More Like This

Preview

This article reviews a number of avenues of new research in voting technology and provides suggestions for how this new area of research can be improved. There are three broad periods in American history that characterize the technology and methods Americans have used to cast votes. A key issue with voting technologies is whether voters are confident that a given technology is effective in counting votes. After the 2000 election, researchers examined which voting technologies captured votes most accurately, using the concept of the residual vote. Closely related to the problem of residual...

This article reviews a number of avenues of new research in voting technology and provides suggestions for how this new area of research can be improved. There are three broad periods in American history that characterize the technology and methods Americans have used to cast votes. A key issue with voting technologies is whether voters are confident that a given technology is effective in counting votes. After the 2000 election, researchers examined which voting technologies captured votes most accurately, using the concept of the residual vote. Closely related to the problem of residual votes is ballot roll-off. Two additional research questions about voting technology are auditing elections and the potential for electoral manipulation. It is shown that voting technologies might affect election outcomes. The use of new techniques for studying observational data should not be seen as a substitute for the use of actual randomized laboratory or field experiments.